Afternoon Pages: March 26th, 2020
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of partial lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.
This was me this morning, got out of bed late and had an extremely late start to the day. I'm probably not as cute as this baby giraffe though. I found the situation frustrating but not wholly unexpected, and I think one area of improvement I need to make is how to avoid losing chunks of time in my day, or how to speed up doing chores or work when needed. The idea of not having a separation between work and life caused by the need to work from home makes time seemingly plentiful, which causes delays in my routine. Maybe I should set some time for doing personal things, like play my ukelele.
Coronavirus stuff continues today. Before opening up the dashboard, I thought the record count for confirmed cases is around 500,000. It's actually 523,163. It was around 467,000 two days ago. Monthly jobless claims went through the roof to 3.2 million, where the previous record was less than 0.7 million, and we haven't even started yet. We do indeed live in interesting times. I should also stop watching the news and get to work.
I did go for a walk earlier today, and there are these cherry blossoms (?) blooming in an office building near where I live. I snapped a bunch of pictures and was pretty happy I got to enjoy the sight. They finally shut down the playgrounds, and people seem a bit more responsible about the whole social distancing thing, so that's good. I also played jackbox.tv with some friends yesterday, and it was really fun. Best part is, even though there are good things happening, I'm also reframing my ability to appreciate them. This is a big change for me from just a few months ago.
"I live in the best of all possible worlds. Everything I do today, I choose to do."